Benchmark Shows Performance Benefits of Equinix Fabric for Cloud Data – Interconnections – The Equinix Blog

Interconnection provides a direct, dedicated route from origin to destination, while traffic crossing the internet must pass through an unpredictable array of public gateways along its journey. For this reason, the internet is simply too unreliable to use for data-heavy workloads like database backup and restore, particularly as those databases continue to grow larger.

At Equinix, we talk a lot about the performance advantages of interconnection over the public internet, which leads many customers to ask just how big the performance gap actually is. To answer that question, we conducted a benchmark collaborating with Oracle. We set out to measure the performance of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) FastConnect via Equinix Fabric compared to the public internet. After rigorous testing, we now have detailed metrics showing the exact performance benefits of interconnection across a variety of network scenarios.

Benchmark methodology: Accounting for different network conditions

For the benchmark use case, the combined Equinix-Oracle team performed a simulated database backup from an Equinix Metal® instance hosted in an Equinix IBX® colocation facility to an OCI Object Storage service residing in an Oracle Cloud region and then restored it. We used a sample database size of about 1 TB. We looked at three different connectivity methods—the internet, FastConnect with jumbo frames (9000 MTU – Maximum Transmission Unit) and FastConnect with standard frames (1500 MTU)—with each option capped at 10 Gbps physical port speed. It is important to note that the setting of jumbo frames is not possible over the public internet.

We also tested three different packet delivery classes:

• High – 99.9% packet delivery rate (0.1% packet loss)
• Medium – 99.5% packet delivery rate (0.5% packet loss)
• Low – 99% packet delivery rate (1% packet loss)

Furthermore, we used a variety of representative latencies to simulate different distances between origin and destination. This ranged from an intracity data transfer (2 ms latency or less) all the way to an intercontinental data transfer (100 ms latency).

Benchmark results: Interconnection performance benefits vary based on conditions

The benchmark results confirmed that interconnection offers performance improvement up to 28x that of the public internet. The results also showed that the performance gap grows significantly as latency and packet loss increase. The graphic below shows what these performance improvements might look like across different latencies within the U.S.

As the graphic shows, an organization executing a cross-country restore between Northern Virginia and Silicon Valley (represented by latency of around 75 ms) would achieve up to 15x higher performance with interconnection even at .1% packet loss. In real terms, this means the average restore time for the sample 1 TB database was around 24 minutes, compared to well over 6 hours to move the same amount of data via the public internet.